French bishops approve removing parents’ gender from baptismal forms

CNA Staff, Jan 22, 2021 / 03:10 am (CNA).- An English Catholic bishop welcomed on Thursday a step forward in the sainthood cause of a religious sister who served poor communities ravaged by cholera and typhoid. 

Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury said on Jan. 21 that it was fitting that Elizabeth Prout’s cause was progressing amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The bishop made the comment on the day that Pope Francis recognized the heroic virtues of the nun known as the “Mother Teresa of Manchester,” meaning that she can now be called “Venerable.”

“It seems appropriate this announcement came during the pandemic when we can look to Elizabeth’s example and ask the help of her prayers as a woman who helped many during the epidemics which swept the industrial communities of Victorian England,” Davies said.

The bishop had appealed for prayers for the advancement of Prout’s cause at a Mass last September, marking the 200th anniversary of her birth.

He recalled that Prout, who was born on Sept. 2, 1820, was “a pioneer of education,” who established day and night schools for the industrial poor and homes of refuge for young women working in factories.

“Together with a handful of companions she confronted the most degrading situations with the confidence of the revolution which flows from Christ’s command: ‘Love one another as I have loved you,’” he said.

Prout was baptized in the Anglican Church. Her father, a lapsed Catholic, worked as a cooper for a local brewery. Her parents disowned her when she decided to join the Catholic Church in her early 20s, at a time when Catholicism was emerging after centuries of persecution in England.

She converted with the help of Blessed Dominic Barberi, the Italian Passionist priest who also received St. John Henry Newman into the Catholic Church.

Prout became a nun at the age of 28, and, a few years after taking her final vows, was given a teaching post in industrial Manchester, where she worked among Irish migrants, women, and factory workers.

During her time as a teacher, Manchester was one of the world’s first industrial cities but workers toiled in abject conditions. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the authors of “The Communist Manifesto,” described working conditions as “hell upon earth.”

Prout founded a religious community inspired by the spirituality of St. Paul of the Cross, the Italian founder of the Passionists. The community was initially called the Institute of the Holy Family, but later renamed the Sisters of the Cross and Passion or Passionist Sisters.

The new institute was criticized for advocating “revolutionary ideas,” because it required religious sisters to earn their own wages to support themselves and taught other women to follow their example.

In 1863, Pope Leo XIII gave the community his approval.  Prout, also known as Mother Mary Joseph, was named the order’s first superior general. Today, the Passionist Sisters work with the poor all over the world, including countries such as Papua New Guinea, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Jamaica.

Prout died from tuberculosis at the age of 43 in Sutton, Lancashire, in 1864. She was buried in the archdiocese of Liverpool, where her cause opened in 1994.

Archbishop Malcolm McMahon of Liverpool welcomed the recognition of Prout’s heroic virtues. 

“Her contribution to the Church and people of England and further afield in the education and healthcare through the institutions she founded and the Sisters of the congregation continues to show the care of the Catholic Church for those in need,” he said.

Prout’s body was laid to rest in the shrine of St. Anne’s Church, Sutton, where it lies alongside those of Dominic Barberi and Ignatius Spencer, an aristocratic convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism who served as a Passionist priest.

“My prayer is that the shrine at Sutton will be a place of prayer for her eventual canonization,” McMahon said. 

Prout’s sainthood cause was submitted to the Vatican in 2008. If she is beatified and canonized — which would require two verified miracles attributed to her intercession — she would be England’s first female saint who did not suffer martyrdom in almost 800 years.

The last non-martyr English female saint was St. Margaret of Scotland, an Anglo-Saxon princess who became Queen of Scotland after William the Conqueror invaded England. She was canonized in 1250.

Passionist Sister Dominic Savio Hamer, author of the book “Elizabeth Prout: A Religious Life for Industrial England,” said: “This is wonderful news for Congregation of the Sisters of the Cross and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

“She loved Our Lord so much and also knew so much suffering in her own life and was conversant with the bad social conditions in which so many people lived in Manchester that she will be an ideal person to pray to in our difficulties today.”

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Rome, Italy, Feb 1, 2017 / 03:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The archdiocese that once sent St. John Paul II to the papacy has a new archbishop: Marek Jedraszewski. The archbishop has special memories of the sainted Pope and the Divine Mercy devotion he brought to the world.

“Thanks to Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, later St. John Paul II, the message of mercy became very important for the world. And this is a message really close to Pope Francis, too,” Archbishop Jedraszewski told CNA.

Krakow is a major center of the Chaplet of Divine Mercy devotion, based on private revelations of Jesus Christ to St. Faustina Kowalska. It hosts Sister Faustina’s convent and a shrine dedicated to Divine Mercy. St. John Paul II was himself a devotee and a popularizer of the Divine Mercy.

But the devotion itself began in the Archdiocese of Lodz, Archbishop Jedraszewski’s previous assignment.

“It is really symbolic that I am coming from Lodz, where the Divine Mercy devotion began, to Krakow, where the devotion flourished. In the Lodz cathedral, Sr. Faustina saw Jesus who told her to enter the convent in Warsaw. The beginning of her spiritual life started in Lodz.”

For this reason, he added, “I feel committed to prolong this mission of mercy in Krakow, even to welcome all of the people coming to Krakow to pray over Sr. Faustina tombs, and actually touch the places Sr. Faustina lived.”

Archbishop Jedraszewski leads the archdiocese that at one time was headed by Cardinal Wojtyla, elected Pope John Paul II in the 1978 conclave. The archbishop recalled his friendship with the late Pope.
 
The new archbishop of Krakow said that their relationship started back in 1975, when he was living at the Polish College in Rome to study philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University.

“Cardinal Wojtyla used to come often to Rome, and stayed at the same college,” he said. “Cardinal Wojtyla was really interested in young Polish students, he spent much time with them, and so he did with me,” he recounted. “As I was studying philosophy, a subject he was very fond of, there were many possibilities to talk and discuss with him about philosophy.”
 
After Cardinal Wojtyla was elected Pope, Archbishop Jedraszewski kept a personal correspondence with him, “in particular when I was appointed bishop, since John Paul II always wanted Polish bishops who passed in Rome to spend a lunch or a dinner with him.”
 
The installation Mass of Archbishop Jedraszewski came in a favorable moment for Polish Catholicism. The latest figures of the Polish Church’s yearbook show a slight increase in the numbers of Sunday Mass attendance, as well as the number of communicants. About 40 percent of Poles attend daily Mass, while about 17 percent receive Holy Communion each Sunday.

The research also stressed the strong commitment of lay people in the Church. In Poland there are some 60,000 organizations involving about 2.5 million people.
 
Archbishop Jedraszewski told CNA that World Youth Day 2017 was “a convincing testimony that Poland cannot be considered a de-Christianized country.”

He noted that the statistics indicate growth not only in the traditionally devout southern Poland, but also in Lodz, a “highly secularized area.”

He concluded that “in the end, we may say that there is an increase of faith in Poland. On the other hand, it is true that challenges given from the secularizing trends are big.”
 
Archbishop Jedraszewski raised the issue of secularization with Pope Francis, during the Polish bishops’ meeting with the pontiff July 27. During that meeting, Pope Francis stressed the danger of gender ideology.

The archbishop also saw this approach to gender as a threat. He said Benedict XVI had affirmed gender theory as more dangerous than Marxist and Communist ideology because “it breaks with the anthropological vision of what the man his according the work of the Creator God.”
 
“God created the man as male and female, while gender ideology does everything possible to cancel differences between man and woman,” Archbishop Jedraszewski said. “This is absurd from a biological point of view, and it does not deals just with the human being: gender ideology has dramatic consequences in social life and in current culture.”
 
In the end “we cannot be open to this ideology, that is profoundly against God the Creator and against everything Christ himself taught us.”

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St. John Paul II, circa 1992. / L’Osservatore Romano.

CNA Newsroom, Dec 7, 2022 / 08:00 am (CNA).

Journalists investigating secular and Catholic Church sources in Poland have called into question allegations by a Dutch writer that St. John Paul II “covered up” sexual abuse while still a bishop in Poland.

On Dec. 2, Ekke Overbeek, a journalist from the Netherlands living in Poland, said he had found “concrete cases of priests abusing children in the Archdiocese of Krakow, where the future pope was archbishop. The future pope knew about it and transferred them anyway, which led to new victims.”

Overbeek referred to the case of the priest Eugeniusz Surgent and “many others” whom Karol Wojtyla allegedly “covered up.”

The Dutch publication NOS, in which Overbeek’s statements appeared, reported the journalist spent three years combing “Polish archives.”

“Almost all documents collected directly about Wojtyla have been destroyed. However, in other surviving documents, he is mentioned very often. And if you put them all together, they are pieces of a puzzle that give a picture of how he dealt with it,” the writer stated, without saying which archives he was referring to.

Polish journalists Tomasz Krzyżak and Piotr Litka of Rzeczpospolita published an investigation that countered Overbeek’s accusations, stating St. John Paul II did not cover up any abuse and consistently acted against such cases during his time as archbishop of Krakow from 1964 to 1978.

The reporters point out that the priest in question, Surgent, was not from the Archdiocese of Krakow but from the Diocese of Lubaczów.

As archbishop of Krakow, the then Cardinal Karol Wojtyla made several decisions concerning Surgent, they explained, “within his competencies, leaving the final word on possible sanctioning of the priest to his ordinary, the bishop of Lubaczów.”

The journalists added that “the then archbishop of Krakow could not do anything about the fact that Surgent was working in two other dioceses.”

The Polish reporters also referred to another incident that illustrated how Cardinal Wojtyla at the time dealt with abuse, namely the case of priest Józef Loranc, who was accused of sexually abusing young girls.

“The absence of punitive measures by the ecclesiastical court does not cancel the crime and does not undo the guilt,” Cardinal Wojtyla wrote in a 1971 letter to Loranc after he was released from prison.

For Krzyżak and Litka, “this behavior” of the later Pope John Paul II “differs considerably from the practice of leniency toward those who had committed such crimes, which was common at the time.”

In the case of Loranc, a priest of the Archdiocese of Krakow until his death in 1992, “Cardinal Wojtyla made immediate decisions in accordance with canon law. And while he gradually lifted canonical penalties and showed great mercy, he remained ever vigilant,” the journalists wrote.

When Cardinal Wojtyla learned of the case in 1970, his decision came just days after learning of the accusations against Loranc.

In a letter, the future Pope John Paul II stated that the accused priest was “suspended” and “could not exercise any priestly function” and would have to “live in the monastery for a certain period of time and make a retreat and receive help.”

The journalists said that Wojtyla “made all the necessary decisions at that moment: the quick removal of the priest from the parish, the suspension until the matter was resolved, and the obligation to live in a monastery,” where civil authorities then arrested him.

The case did not reach the Vatican, they said, because the provision directing what is now the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith — then the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — to deal with abuse cases was not issued until 2001. 

Although he was eventually allowed to celebrate Mass again, Loran could not return to the “canonical mission of catechesis of children and youth” or to the ministry of the confessional.

The Polish Bishops’ Conference, in a statement published Nov. 14, spoke of “increasingly hearing questions about John Paul II’s attitude toward the tragedy of sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable people by the clergy and about his response to such crimes during his pontificate.” 

“It has been increasingly alleged that the pope did not deal adequately with such acts and did little to address the problem, or even covered it up,” the statement continued.

The bishops decried these as a “media assault” on St. John Paul II and his pontificate. The target of such criticisms was “his teaching expressed, for example, in encyclicals such as Redemptor hominis or Veritatis splendor, as well as in his theology of the body, which does not correspond to contemporary ideologies promoting hedonism, relativism, and moral nihilism.”

The statement was not the first time Polish Catholic leaders responded to allegations against St. John Paul II.

In December 2020, following criticism of the Polish pope in the wake of the McCarrick report, 1,700 professors at Polish universities and research institutes signed an appeal defending St. John Paul II.

The signatories included Hanna Suchocka, Poland’s first female prime minister; former foreign minister Adam Daniel Rotfeld; physicists Andrzej Staruszkiewicz and Krzysztof Meissner; and film director Krzysztof Zanussi.

The professors’ appeal followed an intervention by Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki, president of the Polish Bishops’ Conference. In a Dec. 7, 2020, statement, Gądecki deplored what he called “unprecedented attacks” on St. John Paul II. He insisted that the pope’s “highest priority” was combating clerical abuse and protecting young people.

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